


SIX WATERLOO PREQUELS

by ivorygates



Series: Waterloo'verse [1]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Dark SG-1, F/M, Girl!Daniel, Implied or Off-stage Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-21
Updated: 2011-02-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:06:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everybody knows the secret truth: SG-1 is buried in a shallow grave at some crossroads of time and political expediency with a General's stars through its heart.</p>
<p>Six prequel vignettes to "Waterloo Bridge".</p>
            </blockquote>





	SIX WATERLOO PREQUELS

1\. Service

Rudyard Kipling is the Poet of Empire. He's dismissed as a bigot, an imperialist, a minor poet (and it's true that a lot of bad poets have received Nobel Prizes, and even rejected the office of Poet Laureate) and a frivolous entertainer. A very _very_ long time ago, Jack called him a 'dancehall mystic' when they were on an offworld survey and she was stunned enough that she actually walked into a tree, both at the discovery that Jack could come up with a phrase like that and at the discovery that Jack knew Kipling well enough to make such an observation. At the time, she'd simply assumed that Jack didn't like Kipling, but back then she was always making assumptions about Jack. Nobody who knew Kipling well enough to quote him so extensively could dislike him. _(If blood be the price of admiralty, Lord God, we ha' paid in full!)_  
  
Her father loved Kipling, too. Thousands of miles to the west (she puzzled out years later), American children were rioting on college campuses, and thousands of miles to the east, American children were dying in Asian jungles, and beside a fire in the Egyptian desert, Melburne Jackson read the stories and poems of a British Empire of serene and comfortable certainty to his wife and daughter and students and diggers. He'd read them Arthur Conan Doyle and Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens as well, but it had been Kipling he had quoted without a book in his hands. _(And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: 'A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.')_ She doesn't remember much at all about her parents, but she remembers that. She isn't even sure now, years and miles and light-years and deaths later, if she loved them, or if she simply needed them the way a child needs her parents. If she didn't love them, she never got a chance to learn to. They died. Maybe she missed a crucial learning experience, because when she tried loving later, she didn't do it well. Like Guinevere (she's studied a lot of myths) she loved the best knight in all the world, and even if there was no King Arthur to get in the way, she managed to really fuck it up, because Lancelot turned into Merlin (turns out she wasn't Guinevere, but Nimue) and he's asleep in a crystal cave.

The thing about stories that are told over and over without being written down (and even some of the written down ones) is that they adapt to changing times. So Merlin changed over the centuries from a crazy naked Druid to a grave Christian hermit, and in the early versions of the story he was blindsided by a vicious piece of poontang on loan from a Greek myth and in some of the later ones he and Nimue are involved in an unspoken conspiracy because Merlin knows he has to disappear before Arthur can ever become a Real Live Boy. So getting locked up in the Dead Letter Office of your choice _(hic iacet Merlinus, rex quondam rexque futurus)_ is his last act of service to the ideal he's dedicated his life to since long before that upstart Arthur ever came on the scene. She and Jack have fought the _Goa'uld_ together for seven years, and Jack has...

She was five years old when he went into the Air Force Academy. When she was a little girl following her parents around, learning how to lay out a dig site and to recognize promising detritus in the walls of a slit trench, he was learning to fly. When she was with her grandfather in the South American jungle learning how to grind maize for tortillas, he was learning it was good to be the one who survived a dogfight. When she took her Masters' at UCLA, he was taking a Masters' in survival. Jack has served, in one way or another, all her life, and when she first met him, she thought he was just another ignorant parochial American, whose idea of 'service' meant turning the entire planet into an American fief.

But what Jack has served is not America, but dreams. The dream of true freedom (for everyone, even if they aren't born in America, even if they aren't born on _Earth_ ), the dreams of dignity, and independence, and honor. The dream of keeping faith _(as he has kept faith while so many have broken faith with him, even her, especially her.)_ And of victory (because Jack is so very American) but victory serves all those other dreams. He taught her (she thinks) to dream, and she dreamed of the unattainable. Grasped it for a brief shining moment that cut her like a knife, before he, before she, before all of them, offered up everything in the service of dreams. And only Jack's offering was accepted.

She wonders if he dreams now.

_(If blood be the price of admiralty, Lord God, we ha' paid in full...)_

#

2\. Pride

"If we're doing this, you aren't doing that," Jack says, and his voice is ugly with anger. She's thinking that she's the one who usually starts a conversation in the middle and knows where it's going, but - it's Saturday evening, she came back from his house (spent Friday there, in his arms, in his bed, and most of Saturday, too) and wasn't expecting to see him again until Monday, when she wouldn't see Jack, she'd see _General O'Neill_ because that's who Jack is now, at least some of the time.

But he's let himself into her apartment (because he's had a set of keys to every apartment she's ever had) and gone striding past her with nothing more than that, off to her bedroom, and she jumps up off the couch and chases after him. "Jack!"

He's flung open her closet door and is throwing her clothes on the floor. Not to throw them; he's looking for something; and her stomach twists with terror transformed instantly into rage. "Get the fuck out of my bedroom," she snarls, in the instant before she sees the bright flash of red in his hands. One of her dresses. Her _special_ dresses. The only ones she owns. Slut-clothes for whoring in. She grabs for it and he shoves her back. It takes her by surprise - he's never done that - and she staggers, off-balance, clutching at the edge of the closet's sliding doors.

"Never again," Jack says, and it sounds like an answer, but it isn't. He isn't talking to her; he hasn't been talking to her from the beginning. It's a monologue; table for one; and she just happens to be eavesdropping. He's found what he's looking for, and he roots through the back of her closet with casual destructiveness, making sure he has all of them: red and royal blue and the black one cut so low in front she couldn't wear anything under it but a garter belt and panties and the white one that had always amused her because white is the color of virginity here and the color of death in a number of Far Eastern cultures, and he hasn't even taken off his jacket, he doesn't take them off their hangars, he bunches them all together and starts tearing. "You're never doing this again. Do you think I didn't know? Do you think I never watched you? How goddamned stupid are you, Dani?"

The dresses weren't cheap, but they're flimsy. She stands, staring, as he rips open necklines and armholes and zippers and it seems to take an eternity, but it's no more than thirty seconds - if that - before she's found her balance and moves forward and is grappling with him for the wad of costly rags. She's so intoxicated by fury that she feels as if she's floating, and she can barely speak.

 _"Mine!"_ she says, trying to grab them away from him, only tearing them further, and he bares his teeth at her - not a smile - and throws them aside even as she clutches at them and one of the wooden hangars - still snarled in cloth - whips around and hits her in the leg. She flings the tangled mass to the floor. He's yanking open her dresser drawers, throwing everything she owns on the floor - all the sensible cotton sports bras and heavy cotton underwear.

She won't grab him and she won't manhandle him. But she'll hit him as hard as she can; double fists to the top of his back, where the muscle is hard and heavy, and the impact makes her hands sting. "Out! Get- _God-"_ English fails her first, then words; she's so angry she isn't paying enough attention to how angry _he_ is, and she's always paid attention to Jack's temper. She knew he was pissed-off, but when he whirls around and grabs her just below the shoulders, she realizes he's _incandescent._

_(he's hurting her, and something uncoils, warm and hungry, in the pit of her stomach)_

He doesn't shake her, and he doesn't raise his voice, but the next day his hand-prints are black on her upper arms (she's careful to wear long sleeves until the marks fade.) "If you're fucking me you aren't fucking anybody else," he says, his voice low and even and deadly. "And I can't trust you. So at least I can make it harder for you."

He lets go with a push and she stumbles backward, not stopping until she hits the footboard of her bed. She snatches at it for support, the wood hard and sharp beneath her hands, and watches silently as he goes through the rest of her drawers, finding all the silk and lace, ripping and spoiling it all (and she thinks of the conflation of symbol and object, of the Law of Contagion - because the _Goa'uld_ rule by superstition, so the study of superstition, fallacy, magic, has been her business these eight years) but it is not Jack who has either spoiled or despoiled her. The ruin came from somewhere else, from a thousand somewheres, from within, and it's too late to put it right just by throwing out a few garments. She could rend them and pour ashes upon her head _(Abydos is ash, now; it would serve)_ but what's the point, at this late date, of hanging warning signs? If people don't know by now she's dead - has died, has come back, will undoubtedly die again sometime - they just aren't paying attention.

When he's done, Jack stands in the middle of the wreckage of her bedroom, looking as if he's suddenly realized he's arrived in some undiscovered country with no idea of how he got there. "No one else, Dani," he says quietly.

She bows her head - submission, acknowledgement, and she's shocked to weariness by how far the two of them have come and how far they have yet to go. And this moment should be her crowning glory - pride of ownership, pride in being _owned_ \- but it feels like disaster and defeat. _There's never been anyone else, Jack._

#

3\. Avoid

Sam would like Dani to conveniently vanish. Sam thinks it would have been a really great idea if Dani had gone to Atlantis on a nice one-way suicide ride along with Merry McKay, Elizabeth Weir, and the rest of the Chosen Band. Too fucking bad. And these days Jack's got an office with a nice view of the Stargate and Sam's got what (so Dani's been told) every girl in Air Force Blue wants: field command, and Sam isn't going to rock that bright particular boat by going and telling their shiny new General that her best friend's talents could be better employed on some other SG Team.

_(former best friend)_

She's sorry. She said she was sorry. But she was _fucking goddamned sorry_ six months ago, and Sammikins doesn't seem to have gotten the memo, and Dani thinks she might stop being sorry pretty soon.

 _'Oh, god, Sam just touch me. I just need somebody to touch me. I close my eyes and all I see is ice, and I feel like I'm frozen down there in the dark with Jack. Please, Sam...'_ Weakness is a sign of weakness. There must be a Jaffa proverb to that effect. Somewhere.

When she wants to flay herself (and oh, there are so many times she wants to flay herself these days) she thinks about Janet, thinks about the smell of burnt flesh, thinks about the smell of blood - because the cooked flesh had split open - and Wells was screaming, and Janet was dying, and Janet's last word had been: "Cassie," and Dani answered: "I promise," and she'd wanted to laugh (she'd wanted to scream), because they'd all thought, all these years, that Janet was going to have to explain to Cassie why her Aunt Sam or her Aunt Dani or her Uncle Jack or her Uncle Murray wouldn't come to visit her any more, but she'd been able to comfort herself beside Janet's coffin by thinking that at least she and Sam and Jack would be there to take care of Cassie now. Only she hasn't seen Cassie in months, and she doesn't think she'll ever see Cassie again.

At first she still called the house. Sam would talk to her (awkward and forced) and say that Cassie was out, no matter what time Dani called. Now Sam doesn't pick up the phone at all, and when Cassie calls Dani (when she can manage it, because her cellphone won't reach down into the SGC, and Sam has blocked Dani's numbers on the landline) and asks her why she doesn't come around any more, Dani lies. Because Jack is back (has been back for months now) and Cassie talks to Jack, and Jack knows many terrible things about Dani, but this is something he must never know.

She thinks he suspects the shape of it, though. They've all gone out together, the five of them (she can lie by omission when she has to; she's done it for years) but Jack has never asked her - directly, privately - why she doesn't spend Fridays or Saturdays or Sunday afternoons at Sam's house with Sam and Cassie any more _(the way she did before she offered him up as a sacrifice in her private war, before he was frozen, before they started fucking.)_ And maybe that's the reason, because she and Jack share a secret, now, one from which Sam and Teal'c are excluded, and she's gotten all too familiar with the Uniform Code of Military Justice over the years (thanks to Senator Kinsey, thanks to Colonel Simmons, thanks to every one who wanted to shut them down, close them up, jail them and shoot them and throw them to the wolves) and none of it seems to cover her taking it up the ass from the Commander of the SGC, because she's a civilian and he isn't, but she's sure that somewhere, somehow, it's forbidden, and if there weren't something wrong with it (something somewhere in the twisty implicit labyrinth of military assumption she's never quite been able to trace all the way to its heart to see if there's really a Minotaur there) Jack wouldn't be keeping what they do so carefully clandestine. Because in all those past years when she slept on his couch and in his guest bedroom (and once or twice, when spectacularly and memorably drunk, in his bed) and spent long lazy weekends at his house playing chess and drinking Scotch and beer and eating pizza and takeout Chinese and arguing about whether either of them'd had too many beers to drive to the Mexican take-out place and reading through everything she'd brought with her from work while he watched endless sports of some damned sort or another, he'd never bitched at her to be sure to park one street over when she came and kept telling her that they had to _stop._

 _'For god's sake, Dani. We can't go on doing this.'_ And Sam is her CO now and she goes through the Gate following Sam and Sam still smiles in her direction and calls her 'Dani,' but when Sam looks at her offworld, Sam's eyes are distant and cool.

She'd die for Sam (still, forever, always) and she'd kill for Sam (killing is easy, she's had so much practice; only the first death is hard, and she thinks of the shock on Sha're's face and the light fading from her eyes) and she thinks of Sam (snow fell, bright and cold, her first December in Colorado Springs; it was Christmas, and Sam baked her cookies) and she can't stop loving her. But when they come home through the Gate now, Sam's eyes slide away from her, and as soon as the debriefing is over, Sam is gone, and Dani is starting to hate Sam just a little more every day, because when Jack isn't there (and Jack isn't there so much of the time) she remembers everything she's lost. And he tells her they have to stop, and she wants to laugh (the way she wanted to laugh as Janet lay dying), but she doesn't, because he wouldn't understand.

_Stop? If you leave me, Jack, I'll be completely alone._

#

4\. Full

If you want to use the standards, values, and definitions of Middle America (and heterosexual White Christian Middle America of the previous century at that), she and Jack have only had 'normal' sex once: the weekend his brain was being eaten by the Ancient database. And it is not only something they've never talked about, it is something they are _never_ going to talk about, because Dani would rather cut her own throat than initiate any discussion of why it is that Jack can't get hard with her except when she's almost fully dressed and he's sodomizing her. She's more interested in figuring out how to accommodate his needs than in wondering why he has them, because she will take Jack O'Neill on any terms she can get him, no matter what terms they are, no matter what of him (how much, how little, how non-normative) she can get.

She's only been naked in his bed once after he came back, and the interesting thing about that night (she takes it out and looks at it, when she's insulated by enough Scotch, because it's important to gather all the information she can) is that obviously he thought it was going to be ... business as usual. She stripped, he stripped, he'd been hard when she'd gotten into the bed _(but he hadn't made eye-contact with her, and at the time she'd just formed a tentative theory composed of modesty/embarrassment/tact/uncertainty and even shyness - because Jack has a surprising streak of shyness)_ and she hadn't been in the mood for foreplay _(any_ more _foreplay; there'd been seven damned years of foreplay and the time for it was long past)_ , so he'd been hard enough to penetrate her but he'd gone soft immediately _(and he hadn't made any of the nervous American male jokes about this being the first time anything like that had ever happened to him)_ and she'd wanted him the way she's wanted food and water and oxygen and _life_ , so she'd slid out from under him _(coaxing him onto his back)_ and it had taken her almost an hour to blow him _(using every whorish dirty trick she knew)_ and he'd kept his eyes closed the whole time and hadn't touched her once. But he'd come.

And she'd gotten up, in the echoing silence, to dress and go, and he'd said, still not opening his eyes, "Stay." And she'd been half-dressed, and she'd climbed back into the bed just as she was, and he'd reached down to the floor and pulled on boxers and a t-shirt and then taken her in his arms. He hadn't said he was sorry and she hadn't wanted him to. She was in his bed, in his arms.

She's always worn loose shapeless clothes. She's slept naked when she had the choice, but it isn't an option now. To sleep with Jack, she must become a neuter - boxers (his) and sweatshirts (his) and he will touch her if she's clothed. He will kiss her on the lips, she will go to her knees in front of him, she will take his cock in her mouth, down her throat, she will lick him and suck him and he will come for her and she will drink him down, and afterward, lying beside him in his bed, his hand resting _(lightly, possessively)_ on her stomach, the taste and the weight of him heavy on her lips and tongue and memory, she will slide her hand down under the waistband of the boxers that she wears _(Jack's boxers)_ and she will punish her wet and aching flesh until she comes. And when she curls onto her face to sleep, sometimes Jack will stretch his body over hers, and his weight will bear her down into the bed, into sleep without dreams.

And she'd thought that was all she could ever have of him, and it was more than she'd had, it was _enough_ , but she'd spent nearly a quarter of her life _fighting_ \- with Jack, with the world, against, against, against - and she can't stop now because she's not sure what will be left of her if she _stops._ She stopped before _(Jack was lost on Edora; Jack was frozen in stasis)_ and she knows she doesn't dare stop again, no matter what. If she stops, she'll see what she's become, and she already sees her reflection in the faces of the people she passes _(Sam)_ and she knows there's no salvation if you look upon the face of Medusa. And Jack is afraid for her now (afraid for all of them), because he's left behind while she and Sam and Teal'c go through the Gate, and he had no choice about taking this job, but she knows what he doesn't say (she knows the words that fill so many of his silences); she knows he would make the choice Teal'c would make as well, if he could make it without guilt. _('It's better to burn out than to fade away.')_ And it isn't possible, will never be possible again, there's only a long road paved with years and decisions _(hard ones, tainted ones)_ and spending other peoples' lives _(asking them to die for him, for things that aren't even ideals)_ and so they fight as viciously as they ever did, because at least the words they can hurl at each other are things that can cauterize all the thousand poisoned wounds. And it's a bad night, one of the worst nights, and she says unforgivable things, things she swore to herself she'd never say _('if I'd known you weren't going to be able to get it up for me I'd have invested in more sex toys')_ and he drags her into his bedroom and tears her pants half off and puts his fingers up her ass and then puts his cock up her ass. Penetrating her. He's gentle with her, touching her, encouraging her, and he comes. She doesn't, not that time, but it isn't the last time they do that, because for the chance to have Jack in her body she will do _anything._

Anything but be kind.

Because she can't be kind. She's lost that ability, somewhere between the first time she saw the Stargate _(and Jack was there)_ and now, because now she is a catalogue of needs _(as the Stargate Program is a catalogue of needs)_ and once upon a time she knew what she wanted _(Jack and revenge)_ and now she cannot begin to name what she needs, let alone what she wants, because some nights there is so much noise inside her head that she cannot hear the noises outside. And they don't talk _(still don't talk)_ but Jack learns _(has learned)_ what will help her and ease her and let her sleep, just as she has learned what he cannot bear.

"Come on, Dani. Let's go," Jack says. And he folds his hand, and twists, and she whines and gasps as it slides into her, pants at the pressure, the feeling at the edge of pain _(but it isn't pain, or if it is, it's what she wants)_ and he rocks his hand back and forth, easing it deeper _(easing his fist deeper inside her)_ and she clutches at the slats of the wooden headboard, knowing this will help, this will be enough, he can push her to exhaustion this way and - just - before she gets there, she will come.

And that will satisfy Jack _(as much as she is satisfied to feel him, sense him, make him come)_ and he will pull her sweatpants back up from knees to waist as she lies in a dreaming doze, and in her last moment of wakefulness she will feel the mattress dip for the last time and he will gather her into his arms and she will sleep.

And they will still fight and say unforgivable things _(but not the unforgivable thing, or near it, ever again)_ and he will say they have to end this, and she will even agree, and they never do _(they never will)_ because now _(always)_ the true things they have to say to each other are things of silence and secrets, and in that silence she knows that she will take Jack on his terms, on any terms _(so long as she can have him)_ , and he will take her on hers _(and give her what she needs)_ , and they will never talk about what each of them needs to do for the other. About needing each other to survive _(more each day)_ and to fill each other's empty places.

#

5\. Undone

They went in search of the Ancient database on a raw March day when there were patches of snow still on the ground here and there but the trees had a red haze of future leaves on their branches and the air whispered promises of Spring and green and soft warm air. Jack was frozen on a raw March day _(beware the Ides of March, as someone once said)_ , though it was considerably colder in the place he laid down his head _(By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.)_ It was summer when they got him back. It was June.

Ritual years do not follow the path of the sun. In memory she has him for a year, though she doesn't. It's June and July and August (not December, which she spends marooned on Tegalus, and in her opinion the Caledonians and the Rand Protectorate can go _fuck_ each other, only the memory of what she was and what she never will be again says: _No. Not quite._ ) and June again and the next Christmas she gets to spend on Earth, though the General has duties and she no longer has friends _(because SG-1 is shattered and she doesn't understand just how it broke, and she wants to hold it together, and all she can do to do that is tell Teal'c to give her best to Sam and Cassie when he goes off for Christmas Eve and two years ago it would have been the four of them the five of them the six of them because Janet would still have been alive)_ so she spends the day in her office until Jack comes _(cross and at cross-purposes in General's Blue, and she remembers a time when they could mock that uniform together while not mocking his uniform)_ to come and carry her away. By then love and need seem so much like resignation and despair _(a year, more than a year)_ because he no longer threatens _(vows and pleads and promises)_ to give her up, and sometime when she wasn't looking the world slid into monochrome, and the only time it has any color at all is when he's touching her.

He never touches her inside the SGC, and there's a riddle in that _(if she could solve it, could she turn back time?)_ because once upon a time they didn't fuck, hadn't fucked, would never think of fucking, and he touched her all the time; hand on her arm and around her shoulders and mussing up her hair and pulling off her hat and setting it back on again never quite right, casually asserting his right to her clothing, her body, her possessions, her personal space, and all that was hers. And now that he owns them all _(explicitly, absolutely, all that was held for him in trust presented to him in fact)_ he has renounced them in the sight of others. She wonders what he thinks he'll give away, and who's watching, and what more they would know now than in seven other Decembers and Marchs and Julys and Junes. It doesn't matter. In the SGC he no longer belongs to her _(he did once and everyone knew it and he was her most treasured possession and she would never say so)_ but to everyone else. General O'Neill _(desk and phones and endless meetings and when shall we three meet again, In thunder, lightning, or in rain? and the answer is never, never, never because she still wears the same patch but everybody knows the secret truth: SG-1 is buried in a shallow grave at some crossroads of time and political expediency with a General's stars through its heart)._ Commander of the SGC.

The end comes with disastrous swiftness - she should be used to that by now - though victory shouldn't be considered a disaster. They lost every major battle in the past year against enemies within and without, but somehow they manage to win the war. Anubis gone again god knows where, the Jaffa free, the _Goa'uld_ Empire in ruins, and (because of Anubis' ambition) most of the _Goa'uld_ dead. Washington is counting it an unconditional victory and sharpening its knives to pare down their nine-billion-dollar budget. They've done what they set out to do - nine years ago this month, in fact. They've destroyed the _Goa'uld. (They'll be back because they aren't all dead, but they aren't quick thinkers, either, so it won't be for a century, or two, or five, and who the fuck in Washington cares about a threat more distant than the next election year?)_ And she's thinking at least she'll be dead when they do come back, it will be someone else's problem, that they _(she, Jack)_ can quit _(surely they've done enough?)_ when she's called to his office.

Sam and Teal'c are there, too, and he's saying he wanted to tell them first, and she glances down through the window, and Walter and Sly are setting up the podium on the Gate Room ramp, and she knows nobody's coming, so Jack must be making a big announcement, and she wonders what it is, and why he hasn't mentioned it before, when she realizes that he's talking, telling them _(telling her)_ that he's saying goodbye, because he's leaving, and it's not for the day, or for a few days _(off to Washington for one of those meetings he hates)_ , but _leaving_ , because somehow in the scant weeks since their victory he's made up his mind to take up the position at Homeworld _(they offered, he accepted)_ and he's going to Washington and he's never coming back, going thousands of miles from them, from the Stargate, from her. And there will be no time for her to question, no time to understand, because he glances at his watch and says he wanted to let them know first, that he's making the announcement now to everyone, that he's going today.

And he walks out of his office, down to the Gate Room, and they follow, and the room is already filling with people, and Sam and Teal'c walk to the front of the room and she stands at the back. And Jack begins to talk - all the words that are both true and pointless that both of them once despised together - and in the middle of some sentence or other she slips out and goes back to her office and pretends that the last half hour never happened.

She doesn't know when he leaves. The next time she goes to his office _(to the General's office)_ it's after end-of-shift, and when she looks through the Plexiglas wall it's empty and dark and stripped. For nine years this has been home _(last home, only home, best)_ and now it isn't home any more. She goes to her locker to change, to leave. And Sam's is next to hers _(always has been)_ but it's hanging open and empty, and the nameplate is gone too, when she looks, and she runs to their gear-up room _(and all of Sam's gear is gone)_ , and then to 19, to Sam's lab _(where she hasn't been welcome for a year and more)_ and the door is open, the space is stark and gutted and anonymous, filled with the crates and file-boxes of _leaving. (Sam is leaving her; Sam left her a long time ago; her fault; always her fault.)_ It's Chloe Alderson who finds her still standing in the doorway of the lab that used to be Sam's and isn't any more and tells her that Sam has taken a transfer to Area 51. General O'Neill signed the orders just today. One of the last things he did.

_(gone, gone, everyone is gone: Jack, now Sam, SG-1 is gone. 'And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.')_

Only Teal'c is left, and she knows he'll be leaving soon. The Jaffa need him. And he's done what he came here to do. They all have. She goes back to her locker, strips off one identity, puts on another. Masks, all masks, she has become the masks she wears. She leaves, meaning to go home _(how can it be home when Jack is going so far away?)_ , but when she stops, it's in his driveway. She lets herself into the house. It's empty - as empty as Sam's lab. Dark and cold and everything gone _(Jack is not going, Jack is gone.)_ There's nothing left _(of him, of her, of them)._ She sits down on the hearth of an abandoned house, and this year March is soft and warm, and nine years ago this month there was snow outside but she sat here and in here there was light and life and warmth.

Over now. All undone.

_(why did you leave me why did you leave me why did you leave me why)_

Undone.

#

6\. Grace

Jack leaves them all on a Friday and so does Sam. Sam doesn't say goodbye to Dani, but Sam says goodbye to Teal'c, and Teal'c says goodbye to Dani, and he's gone before another week has passed. Their new commander, successor in interest, is a man who calls himself "Hank", and she is Dani and Jack is Jack _(was Jack; she does not know who he is now)_ , but she thinks (unfairly) that General Landry should be a _Henry_ instead of a _Hank._ Some nicknames imply the wrong things.

She can't tell how General Hank Landry feels about having Sam gone and having Teal'c leave; the entire SGC is on stand-down while they're being inventoried and their mission is being reassessed and she barely notices the chaos surrounding her and doesn't care. She's not sure how something so terrible can have happened to her without warning; how it can be terrible without anybody lying dead or bleeding; why nobody is mourning but her. She doesn't understand where her _life_ has gone, and she thinks about pretending the last decade didn't happen and taking up her life again from that timely interruption and realizes she can't imagine how to do that. She's learned to do impossible things but she's lost some essential qualities, and she isn't quite sure what her next step is, or where to look for what she's lost.

It's important to begin at the beginning, though _(and go on until you get to the end, then stop, and Jack's eternal habit of quoting children's books as if they contained some immaculate wisdom used to vex her to madness but she would consign every harsh word she ever spoke to some burial trench of memory if it would unmake the past and hey they've got a time-machine around here somewhere so why doesn't she just do that?)_ so she will begin with endings, making it easy for General Landry by giving him an SG-1 hat-trick: she'll resign. She will follow Jack to Washington and she will ask him a question _(make a demand)_ , and she hasn't decided what it is yet. It might be: _marry me._ Or it might be: _let me go to Atlantis._ Because _Daedalus_ is coming be back from Atlantis, it will be back next month, spending six weeks here before going back. She could be on it. Or not.

And if the act of partition takes infinitely longer than the whole mechanism of her recruitment and arrival and the solution of Catherine's riddle and a journey to Abydos and the slaughter of a god, she's in no hurry. T'were best done slowly, and she needs to sort and pack her magpie packrat life for safe disposal (by her, by others) because there are things you dispose of carefully, like toxic waste and unexploded bombs, and her life (life history) is both of these things.

And it's shocking, like laughter at funerals and lamentations at weddings (though both are seen, both are done, this tiny artificial archipelago of law and grace, the dying of the American Century, with its odd and parochial customs, is neither the standard nor the norm, for this planet or this galaxy) to see that even now the SGC is getting new recruits, but it is; other peoples' lives are going on (even beginning) as if they’re walking not just to a different drummer but to a whole different fucking symphony. She doesn't see most of them (too busy packing) and in the wild disorder of the first Base-wide inventory in almost a decade most of her department has barely noticed that she's stripping her office to the walls.

She sees one of the new ones, though. His name is Cameron Mitchell, and his eyes are blue _(she thinks of Sam and doesn't know why.)_ He saved their lives in Antarctica, saved Earth as much as they did, and Antarctica took the Snakeskinners away from him, and now he's come here wanting SG-1, not knowing that Antarctica took that away from him too until General Landry tells him. She assumes Landry has told him, because Mitchell is trying to talk her into staying, but _Daedalus_ has been here three weeks and that gives her three more weeks to settle the rest of her life. She'll be out of here in two at most.

It doesn't matter what she knows of Mitchell's history (quite a lot, actually), he looks ... untouched ... as if the things that have happened to him have only happened on the outside, as if they are things (still) that he can set aside as aberrant moments in an otherwise well-ordered life. A life with rules. A life that makes sense. And he stands in the doorway of her office and he smiles at her, and she thinks of Sam - the first time she ever saw Sam - on Abydos, standing beside the DHD, her eyes _(blue eyes)_ glowing and her face alight with wonder, because that's what the universe was (then): a place filled with wonder. Dani tried so hard to hold on to that. She managed for a while. And sometimes (early days) it seemed as if she and Sam were in a race to see who could become disillusioned first - by old friends, new enemies, pain and betrayal and lies and loss. It was a contest neither of them had actually wanted to win. She supposes they can declare it a tie now.

And now Lieutenant Colonel Mitchell has arrived, wanting her to begin again, wanting her to become complicit in his damnation, and she won't. She doesn't know what will happen to him, but she doesn't intend to watch. Running to, running away, she isn't sure any more: she wants Jack to kiss her and tell her that everything's going to be all right or else to put a bullet through her head; at this point she doesn't really care. Jack always has a good reason for everything he does, and he left. She doesn't know why _(ask him)_ but she knows it means she doesn't belong here, watching smiling blue-eyed boys prepare to bleed.

#

 

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**Author's Note:**

> I spent most of a year writing Waterloo Bridge, and throwing out about half of what I wrote to get the story into manageable shape. Along the way, I found out a lot of stuff about the 'verse that didn't make it into the final piece. So Synecdochic gave me six prompt words, and I wrote the backstory.
> 
> This is no place to go for a good time.


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